Author: Erma Mulabdic

Having a healthy work-life balance is one of the prerequisites of success, you might agree. Letting your work run you over like a paver doesn’t only hurt your body and soul, your relationships with others, but it can ruin your carefully bred, assiduously cultivated social life.

Luckily, we at IT Girls don’t worry too much about that. It’s true; we work on this as a side project to our existing work commitments. This means we put in a huge amount of after-work hours and weekends. Sometimes we overdo it to the extent where we start snarling at each other, in an attempt to channel frustration, but come across extremely amusing and end up as protagonists of a perpetual joke. Such was the situation when, after a six-hour brainstorming exercise for the purpose of our strategic long-term planning, we wanted to review our budget and expenditure. I think you could really see the sparks flying when Lamija finally screamed: “Give me the freaking keyboard!” For the rest of us it was a queue to stop before we all set off into an IT girls break down. That phrase remained as a substitute for when you really want to do something without wanting to explain yourself too much, and we all get it.

Working is, though, by far not the only way we decide to spend time together. The fact that we brought this idea to life together and that we can stand proud at the kind of success it has had so far, created a special bond between us. It’s the kind of bond that emerges among like-minded individuals, with different backgrounds and various interests, but with one (or at least one) common notion. The rest was a process. By rest I mean communication, team building, work relations – they were all built up around this binding idea. So were friendship, support, care and understanding for one another. It was no longer enough to work together, so we decided to take it outside. And we’re having a blast!

It can be a bit less of a blast if you have to work the day after. Once, after a long night of partying, IT Girls decided to make a working Saturday. It will be remembered by a long and painstaking task, the outcome of which was the glorious IT Girls logo with purple arrowheads and guess what else? – The dot on the “i”. I can proudly say it took me almost five hours to color the arrowheads and put that dot on top using an online photo editor. Not the most cognitively demanding assignment, but that day it seemed like rocket science.